Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Google Options Make Masseuse a Multimillionaire - New York Times

Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are each worth about $20 B each and the weatlth has not stopped there. A few look-ins:

" Although no one keeps an official count of Google millionaires, it is estimated that 1,000 people each have more than $5 million worth of Google shares from stock grants and stock options."

"“It isn’t considered ‘Googley’ to check the stock price,”said an engineer...[but]...Others admit that, when gathered around the espresso machine it is hard to avoid the topic of their sudden windfalls.“It’s very clear that people are taking nicer vacations,"

Not surprisingly this wealth has made some nice stories, for instance:

""Bonnie Brown...in 1999...On a lark, she answered an ad for an in-house masseuse at Google, then a Silicon Valley start-up with 40 employees. She was offered the part-time job, which started out at $450 a week but included a pile of Google stock options that she figured might never be worth a pennyAfter five years of kneading engineers’ backs, Ms. Brown retired, cashing in most of her stock options, which were worth millions of dollars...."

"Jim Cramer, the high-decibel CNBC talk-show host, told his audience...“never to take financial advice from anyone who doesn’t recommend Google.”

Google['s]...market capitalization...nearly equals the total value of the three largest traditional media companies: Time Warner, Walt Disney and the News Corporation. Even at Google’s current stock price, 34 of the 38 analysts following the company have buy recommendations...Fred Hickey, editor of The High-Tech Strategist newsletter...is one of the few willing to call Google’s stock surge “insanity.” But even he isn’t predicting when it might end. He has placed a tiny bet against Google, but no more. “You cannot short a mania,” "